The Uphill Battle

There’s a joke that follows every percussionist. You’ve heard some version of it — the one about the knocking that speeds up, the one about what you call the guy who hangs around with musicians.

I’ve been hearing them for thirty years. I still laugh at the good ones.

But here’s what I’ve started noticing. Percussion is the only section of the orchestra that had to argue its way in. Strings were assumed. Winds were assumed. Drums had to make a case — piece by piece, composer by composer, across about two hundred years. Somebody had to convince a room full of people that a bass drum belonged there at all.

That’s a strange inheritance to carry.

Percussion is the only section of the orchestra that had to argue its way in.

It also turns out to be useful.

We had a guest artist in the studio this week, Dieter Henning, sitting with our students and talking about the shape of a career. He said something I’ve been chewing on since: every musician needs a team.

Not a manager and a booking agent. Collaborators. The people who make the thing with you. Nobody is going to hand you the room, and you don’t build it alone either — you build it with somebody.

Which is, historically speaking, the percussionist’s entire job description.

We’re the ones who show up to a piece with no performance tradition and work out what the instrument even is. We’re the ones who invent the setup because the setup isn’t written down. We convince the composer. We find the four other people who want to make the strange thing with us.

Nobody asks. That’s the whole point.

I spent twenty years building Nief-Norf, and not one day of it began with an invitation. It began with a phone call to somebody whose work I wanted to be near.

So here’s the small thing, if you’re carrying something nobody has asked you for.

Name one person who would make it better. Tell them about it this week.

Not a pitch. Just the idea, said out loud, to somebody whose work you respect. That is how every real thing I have made got started — not with a plan, with a conversation.

The joke is that drummers just hit things.

The truth is we have spent two centuries learning how to argue for the thing we want to make, and then making it anyway.